It was a little like ramming my old Jeep through too much snow. Back up, then floor it, and repeat as required until I either got through or hopelessly stuck. But this was no Jeep, this was a 75,000 hp nuclear-powered Russian Icebreaker. Again and again the ship slammed the solid six-foot-thick ice, breaking and tumbling Jeep-sized chunks under our bow. On the ship’s bridge 125 feet above the ice, our eyes focused first on the on the white chaos all around us and then on the GPS display. Eightynine degrees, fiftysix minutes, it read. Four hundred feet to go. Another back, another ram, and another, and finally the numbers crept through 57 minutes, then 58, then 59, then 59.5, 59.6 . . . and stopped at 90 degrees, 00.00 minutes north latitude! East, west, and north had vanished. From here, there was nowhere to go but south. The big red “Yamal,” with upwards of 200 passengers, staff, and crew had come to rest on top of the Earth!It was July 21 at 9:30 a.m. (Greenwich Mean Time).

With the ship wedged firmly in the ice, a half-dozen riflemen hustled down the gangway and spread out icy hummocks with good views, setting flags along the way to mark cracks, leads and other hazards to wandering novices. They carried rifles because big white bears are always hungry and aggressive. Crews lowered tables, chairs, provisions, and music systems to the frozen sea and fashioned bars and counters of ice for the chilling and serving of refreshments. They pitched tents for those who wished to camp out, cut a swimming pool through the ice, and planted a flag to mark the pole. No monument is permanent here, resting as it does on the pack ice floating on an ocean 14,000 feet deep. A couple of “days” after we “parked,” when the Yamal backed out of her seemingly immovable mooring, the GPS showed that the pack had drifted, ship and all, about three miles from the pole.

The ice was brilliant under the polar sun, and the 40-degree (F) air was still. Hand in hand, I skipped with my trophy-wife of 49 years (ok, we did not exactly “skip”) through 24 time zones, always counter-clockwise around the pole in order to cross the international dateline into yesterday and thus get a day younger. Others joined us, somebody turned on music, and around it we all danced, walked, or otherwise cavorted, in a big circle, hand in hand. Getting to the North Pole was a novelty, and the delightful silliness of the celebration soon subsided. The smell of barbeque soon drew the revelers to the icy serving line, where they heaped their plates for a polar feast.

As the festivities died down, many of us wandered amongst the pressure ridges under the watchful eyes of the bear-police. We took rides in the 20-passenger Russian helicopter that operated off of the flight deck on the aft end of the ship. Once aloft we were free to open the big oval windows stick our heads and/or cameras out for clear and commanding views.

There were sign-up sheets for swimming, but alas, the pool could not be kept clear of refrigerator-sized chunks of floating ice, so the swimming had to be cancelled. (Drat!!) Those who elected to spend the “night” in tents on the ice found the experience more like sleeping in a sauna than camping, because in the summer the sun does not set. In fact, when you are at the pole, it just goes around the horizon at the same height all the time, sinking ever so slightly every “day” as summer wanes. That is how the old timers could tell that they were at the pole, before GPS.

Our cruise began in Murmansk, which is one of Russia’s most important ports because ships can reach it during most of the year. But ice-free waters do not mean ice-free ships. I still remember the black-and-white newsreels of my youth, wherein ice-covered American merchant ships moved through bitter northern seas during the Great War, transporting vital supplies beleaguered Russia under the “Lend Lease” program. Hearing Edward R. Murrow intone the word “Murmansk” made me shiver. The word itself has sounded cold to me ever since.

It was not particularly cold in Murmansk when we embarked on Yamal, but it was dreary and rainy. The city is a port of military importance, a base for nuclear submarines and other warships, and although the security did not seem obsessive, we were asked not to take pictures around the port. Taking pictures of things or people on the decks of Yamal was ok, and we were told that there would not be trouble if some background accidentally showed up in our viewfinders. The place is not especially photogenic anyway, and I did not feel deprived of a chance to take prize-winning photos. US State Department warnings about foreign travel indicate that a handheld GPS unit can be a problem in Russia. I don’t know how serious that is, but decided not to bring one anyway.

Our cruising days passed quickly, in large part because Quark Expeditions (www.quarkexpeditions.com), who runs these icebreaker cruises, has a world-class staff of experts in history, geology, birds, beasts, and fish, who give slide illustrated talks once or twice a day. These should not be missed. Translators are provided for non-English-speakers. The passenger list consisted of about one-third Americans; the rest are Japanese, Belgians, Swiss, Austrians, and other Europeans, and Australians and Brits. The lecture room is well laid out, but is on a lower deck in the forward part of the ship, and noisy when we got into the ice. But that’s ok. We loved it, even if it did sound like being dragged along a rocky road in a dumpster. Sometimes there is a really wonderful crash, followed by a ship-wide shudder, and loud “whooshing” from the bubble machine. The bubble machine is not a tribute to Lawrence Welk. It consists of big tanks from which compressed air can be released explosively through vents near the ship’s keel to lubricate passage through ice. The captain also has the capability to shift massive amounts of water ballast fore-and-aft and side-to-side, making the ship shift and squirm. Ramming and bashing, fuming and squirming on a 21.000-ton ship sounds like a rollicking experience, but the ride itself is surprisingly gentle.

Not to worry, though. Yamal is not the Titanic, and the Russian captain and crew have many years of experience in this stuff. Yamal was not designed to be a cruise ship, but is quite comfortable nonetheless. Once the tourist-cruising season is done, she returns to her workaday function of keeping the shipping lanes open along this “Northeast Passage” along the northern coast of Russia and Siberia from Murmansk to the Bering Strait. On the other hand, the fabled “Northwest Passage,” from the Atlantic across the top of Canada to the Pacific stirred the blood and took the lives of many explorers in the times before Roald Amundsen finally accomplished it in 1908. It not only took him 3 years, but once he had accomplished it, nobody could figure out how to make a profit out of doing it again. Until expedition cruising came along, that is.

Passenger quarters are quieter than the lecture room, and we found the grinding and whooshing restful. We may be weird, but others voiced similar sentiments. Aside from the occasional “crash,” or perhaps a bear-call (bears don’t do shifts; they are on call 24/7) on the PA system, we tended to sleep peacefully.

The dining room (with open seating so people get to know each other pretty well by the end of the voyage) is roomy and pleasant, with superb European-style cuisine, a fine wine list and any kind of mixed drink. The kitchen staff is Austrian, and the dining hall and housekeeping staff Russian. The cocktail lounge is a bit weird though. There is a tiny bar at one end of a passageway that stretches athwart-ships, with chairs along the wall. One gets one’s drink and a handful of peanuts at the bar, and then finds one of these chairs, preferably between two interesting companions. It is reminiscent of waiting to get license plates in some municipalities, except you don’t have to take a number.

It is not especially cold on deck and there are lots of sunny, sheltered places. We spent a lot of time out there, looking for wildlife and watching ice blocks the size of cars and small trucks roll and tumble along the sides of the ship. Crashing into a solid expanse of ice slows progress noticeably until a “lead,” or crack in the ice starts somewhere ahead and gradually spreads along a zigzag path as the ship pushes the slabs apart. The course correspondingly zigzagy, deflected by the direction taken by the leads. You can record hours of video tape of this stuff. When you get home, nobody will want to watch more than a few minutes of it. Trust me. Video just doesn’t do the job.

The prize of all wildlife sightings is the polar bear, and if one is around, it doesn’t stand a chance of dodging photographers, which it won’t do anyway because it is rarely shy. Upwards of a hundred eyes keep constant watch in all directions. Darkness is no concealment, because there isn’t any. A bear is mainly interested in cute furry animals to eat, but a big ice-breaking ship is a novelty that usually excites its curiosity. Come to think of it, maybe it is food-smells (us) that attracts its attention. The ship stops for any and all bears, to give them ample time for passenger viewing. This is a two way thing. A polar bear is disarmingly cute for so vicious a predator, and will sit on the ice and look up at the people who are looking down at him, then get up and walk or swim around the ship, amble off, then think better of it, and come back and look and sniff some more.

Sometimes there are walrus (it is amazing how many of them can haul up onto a small slab of ice at once) and whales, especially orcas, narwhals, and belugas, which show themselves mostly as disturbances in the water. Seals are hard to spot because they are the meals of choice for polar bears, and they would be extinct if they weren’t very good a hiding. Exotic wild life like this is uncommon enough to be worth jumping out of bed and running down stairways and gangways for. It is always best to keep a camera handy, and the lighting is good at all times of the day or “night.”

Franz Josef Land, an archipelago of 191 islands lies between Russia and the Pole. Uninhabited now, there are scattered ruins of research stations and military outposts, and a few forlorn graves that mark misfortunes of early explorers. In season, these are surrounded by carpets of glorious ground-hugging arctic flowers between rocks. Some islands are nothing but tall rocks that jut from the sea and provide nesting places for thousands of seabirds. Visiting these places provided gentle decompression from our Polar cruise experience. Talks, special dinners, conversations with special companions, and recaps of our experiences filled the days of our journey back to Murmansk. The arctic has addicted us. There is no cure. It keeps luring us back for just one more look.